N V Sathyanarayana is a former librarian and a successful entrepreneur. He is the Founder Director of Informatics India Ltd, Bangalore, India – a leading information products and services company, established in 1980. Currently, he is the Chairman and Managing Director of the company. Sathyanarayana started his career as a librarian and worked in different institutions and agencies before promoting the company, his brainchild, which pioneered the introduction of international online database access in 1984. His company was the first to introduce and market CD-ROM technology products in India in 1988.
Sathyanarayana has received the Young Information Scientist Award in 1991 from the Society for Information Science, India. He organized INFOTEX’93, India’s first international information industry conference. The Library Technology Conclave (LTC) he organises every year is one of the most sought after academic events among the information professionals. Sathyanarayana has travelled extensively worldwide for business and industry events including his visit to the United Kingdom as a British Council Scholar. A frequent speaker at various information-professional events, he is also actively associated with the editorial teams of prestigious journals in information science.
For Open Interview, Sathyanarayana shares with Gopakumar V about his journey as a library professional, entrepreneur and successful leader of an information products and services company. He recounts those milestones of initial years of computer and internet technology that led him to build information services company. He also shares his impressions and thoughts on the trends in library technology, impact of AI on information industry and libraries, developments in open access domain, government’s newly launched scheme ONOS, entrepreneurship and tips for information professionals for venturing into start-up domain.
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• You are one of the very few professionals who successfully established a business firm with Library and Information Science (LIS) as your educational background. What thought or vision inspired you to this transition, and how did the LIS education contribute to your journey?
I had no grand vision initially. I guess my rebellious nature drove me to take risks and do something different with my six years of LIS knowledge and experience. It was a crazy adventure. Neither did I have the money then, nor could I afford considering my family background and commitments. I was still not married by then, which was an advantage. Fortunately, the first cheque for starting the bank account came from an R&D centre of MIT Lab in Bangalore, a pharma company to whom I had provided a bibliographic service. This was followed by document delivery and translation support, further extending it to a literature review report. This was in 1978, the beginning of the Informatics journey, which was formalised as a registered private limited company in May 1980. It became a public limited company in 2003, with some of the employees also becoming shareholders of the company.
The idea of venturing into business evolved while I was working in the R&D centre at Smith Kline & French (SKF), a pharma company in Bangalore during 1975-76, my third job. There, I could gain commercial insight into a variety of global information products and services. I could recognise the use-cases and understand the information-intensive nature of pharma R&D. By then, the concept of an information broker, someone who provides search service support to companies and related supporting services like document delivery, had caught up in the West. I thought that acting as an information broker could be a good kick-start opportunity. I can also say that Eugene Garfield’s success as an entrepreneur in the LIS domain was indeed an inspiration. I had contacted him while in SKF, expressing my interest in working with his Company to promote its interest in India.
Another interesting challenge I noticed during those days was the delayed delivery of foreign journals to libraries by 3-4 months as the shipping was by surface mail. Airmail was too expensive, often exceeding the journal’s subscription price. I was working at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), then my second job. There were talks in the professional circle about airfreighting the journals through consolidation in the US and Europe to reduce the delivery time to 2-3 weeks at a marginal increase in cost. But this required a larger shipment volume, which no single library in Bangalore ever had. National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) had started experimenting with this idea through a subscription agent in the UK, which was proving to be quite expensive for just one institution.
From the germination of many such ideas, it took a while to start, which happened a year after I moved to HMT in Bangalore, my fourth and last job in my LIS career.
• What was the library-centric ‘information products industry’ when you started your firm, and how did you identify the opportunity to capitalize on it?
The information industry did exist in those days, too, but it was unheard of in India. In the U.S.A., the Information Industry Association (IIA) was founded in 1968 by a group of publishers and database producers around the time when online information companies like Dialog were emerging. IIA was later merged with the Software Publishers Association (SPA) in 1999 to become the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). That was the time when publishing was fast going digital with the Internet taking off. SIIA has memberships from companies like Microsoft, McGraw-Hill, the New York Times, Oracle, etc. The information industry has many domain-specific segments like financial, legal and regulatory, market research, educational, and scholarly and research information. In addition to this, today’s social media networks like Facebook and YouTube give an even broader view of the information industry, which is driven by content and technology. Traditional library-centric information is a tiny segment of today’s Information Industry.
The early years (the 1980s) were a hard struggle as the academic segment was hardly a potential market for information services, hence we focused on industries with a strong R&D focus. It was like doing any, and hence many, odd jobs to libraries. A major project we did then was the classification and cataloguing of the entire collection of the Central Secretariat Library of Karnataka Government in Bangalore (1978-79), which had about 70,000s books. We were just two people in the company then, but we managed the entire project by hiring temporary staff who were just-passed-out students from library schools. We were paid Rs.2.75 per book then!
By 1981-82, we settled down to a few focussed areas like search service, document delivery, translation services, etc., for the industries, and journal subscription service for the academic libraries, which was a low-hanging fruit. Online database searching was slowly spreading in the US and Europe and then driven by companies like Dialog and Data Star. I was quite excited about it. However, the country didn’t have the required telecommunication technology infrastructure then. Although it was a struggle, the excitement of novelty kept us moving! We initially used telex as a means of access as it was the only data communication network in India which could connect us to global data networks to access and search global online databases. We tried online searching using a telephone line connected to a Modem, but it was too expensive and unreliable. We had to wait for the emergence of a data communication network in India, which happened towards the late 1980s.
The mid-1980s also saw the emergence of CD-ROM databases as an alternative to online. CD-ROM was more convenient, especially for the Indian libraries, as online access was too expensive due to the absence of data network in India. CD-ROM’s subscription-based pricing model was more convenient and acceptable to academic and research libraries than online databases’ unpredictable pay-by-use pricing model. We shifted our focus to CD-ROM marketing but continued with online option for the industries.
• In such technological landscape, internet must have brought a paradigm shift in the information business?
Yes, indeed. The advent of the Internet brought a paradigm shift in the information business. It took off in India during the late 1990s. The government’s open policy of encouraging the private sector’s entry in communication and IT led to the rise of local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for establishing country-wide internet access infrastructure. It was a period of the evolution of networked digital libraries, with digital content producers and data networks driving the future of libraries. With this fast-changing content-technology landscape, we had to redefine and re-identify our business direction throughout the first two decades of our company. But it was an exciting challenge of continuous new learning. Our business grew with the content going digital faster, driven by the Internet.
My 3-weeks business exploratory visit to the U.S.A. in 1984 was also of great help in identifying specific opportunity areas and setting a direction for our growth. The visit included attending a training program in Dialog, the leading pre-internet online information company then for libraries, and ISI to meet Eugene Garfield again, whom I had met the previous year when he had visited India. ISI had launched an easy-to-use personal library management software called Scimate (like today’s EndNote or Mendeley) for researchers to manage their personal library of reprint collection and generate the citation lists in the required standard format like MLA, APA, etc., with minimal training requirement. Garfield’s wife, who was heading this product, gave me a copy of this software and asked me to try marketing and supporting this product in India. PCs were entering the market, and we already had a PC in our office by then!
Following this visit, I identified a few specific directions for the company’s planned growth which included: (1) expanding print journal subscription by setting up consolidation centres in the U.S.A. and UK; (2) identifying information and software products for libraries in India to distribute and support; (3) providing indexing and abstracting service to database in U.S.A. and Europe; and (4) gradually planning for local development of information products. This visit also helped me in defining a vision for our company going forward.
• Like any entrepreneur or a businessman — initial challenges are almost certain. Did you face any initial hiccups when you started Informatics India Ltd.? If yes, what are those challenges, and how did you overcome them?
Yes, As early pioneers, we faced numerous challenges that often threatened our survival. The lack of IT infrastructure stunted our growth until the late 1990s. Irrational tax laws and Government regulations have often led to crippling our business, which continues. But we have kept innovating to address these challenges.
I can even say our business started with a disaster. As I mentioned earlier, I was in touch with Eugene Garfield while in SKF to work with his Company as its sales and marketing partner in India. A series of emails over a long period resulted in Garfield agreeing to launch his products in India, appointing us as his marketing and distribution partners. Following this, Garfield’s Vice President (Richard Harris) scheduled a week-long visit to India to train us and launch the marketing of our partnership through a launch seminar. ISI even agreed to share the cost by giving US$300 to organize this launch event. Before his visit, Harris sent a draft agreement and shipped samples of all ISI products to us, which included the latest annual cumulative print version of the Science Citation Index, then ran to ten or more volumes. Haris visited Bangalore (1978), and we organized the joint seminar, as scheduled, at the Ashoka Hotel. Harris cut short his visit and left Bangalore the following day without concluding the agreement, saying his boss wanted him back urgently, leaving us in the lurch. I had already quit my job at HMT that year, dreaming of an exciting start! It is a poetic irony that ISI came back to us to sign the deal eight years later!, This partnership lasted for over 25 years until we had to exit from our third-party distribution business due to the introduction of TDS on importe of software and databases in 2011-12 Union Budget of our Government.
We started promoting online searching of global databases in the mid-1980s, which involved payments in foreign currency. While it was an exciting time learning and working with technologies new to the country, it took almost a decade to get the RBI and the Finance Ministry to recognise and regularise the import of information through online search with a policy directive. During this period, funded by the UK Government through its Developing Countries’ Trade Agency (DeCTA), we ran a daily information service for Indian exporters to track and identify global export opportunities (tenders and contracts) through online databases. DeCTA initiated this service as part of bilateral trade promotion agreements between India and the UK governments. Noticing the increase in foreign exchange out-flow from our company, which was due to this service, RBI asked us to get a policy directive from the Finance Ministry to continue payment. This process took almost two years, crippling our online service activities significantly and the closure of service to Indian Exporters.
The lack of foresight to understand the needs of technology-driven electronic information businesses by the regulatory authorities (government) and the consequent irrational tax laws have been a perennial challenge for us as pioneers in the e-information business of India. The classic example is the imposition of TDS in the 2011-12 budget of the Indian Government, which I referred earlier, on the import of global software and databases, treating them as equivalent to copyright licensing. It took seven years for the Supreme Court to reverse this clearly flawed law with its 2019 ruling, making it clear that software is a “copyrighted material” and its sale should not be treated as copyright licensing by tax authorities to impose TDS. But by then, we had irrecoverably lost about Rs.100 crore of our global e-journal and database business in India, which we had built over two decades. It is sheer luck that we survived. With the beginning of the Internet and over the last twenty years, we have made a conscious shift from trading to our own products and services for both global and local markets. This strategy has changed our profile.
• You have come a long way in your business. What are the key rewarding experiences or breakthroughs in your journey?
I can list many. We are the early adopters of technology with many firsts in our business in the country. Let me recollect a few here.
When the country-wide global data network (before the Internet) was set up in India by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL), a public sector company, in the late 1980s, the Chairman of VSNL then (Mr TCH Choudhary) asked me to set up online search centres in partnership with them at their Mumbai and New Delhi offices to help the industries use online databases. We branded this centre as Infotel. This initiative helped us in popularising online searching, , particularly among the companies, well before the Internet entered India.
As mentioned earlier, the DeCTA project of launching Export Opportunity Services as a daily alert to Indian exporters, initially funded by the UK Government, was a rewarding learning experience in understanding the information business opportunities in segments outside the library market. We even came out with a product called Export Flash, which ran for some time.
Our shift to CD-ROM database distribution and CD-ROM publishing in the late 1980s was a very rewarding experience, though it was a short-lived technology, later overtaken by the Internet. We marketed global CD-ROM databases and drives, supported high-end CD-ROM networking solutions, and entered CD-ROM publishing field. We produced a few CD-ROM databases of local interest. We lobbied successfully with the Government to get the import duties down from 180% to 25% to nil!
Launching J-Gate in 2001, when e-Journal momentum was kicking off, is one of the most learning and rewarding experiences both professionally and monetarily. Not only did we develop the database, but we also developed the online hosting and searching solution. Hardly any database producers in the West had developed their own online hosting infrastructure in those days.
Providing database creation support to global information companies is another very rewarding experience for us. We worked with companies like Reuters, Chemical Abstracts, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Elsevier, etc. A massive news media indexing project, we handled for Reuters in 1994 that ran for two years, was one of our most engaging projects. The project required setting up an IT infrastructure to network our office with about hundred staff members. We developed a networked work-from-home model connecting Reuters’ server for receiving the content online and sending the indexed records with less than 24 hours of turn-around time. It was a great experience to manage people working from home with networked connections to systems outside India in those days when the Internet was still not a ready-to-deploy infrastructure in India.
We had many engaging academic activities, too. We organized the first international conference i.e. InfoTex’93 for the Society for Information Science (SIS), New Delhi. This was the first Information Industry conference in India engaging both the libraries and the industry with several domestic and global companies in the Information Industry participating as speakers and sponsors. The conference attracted leading newspaper companies, business and finance magazines, and academic publishing companies. Subsequently, as the President of the Society’s Bangalore Chapter, I organised the first national conference in India on Digital Libraries in 1996 at the IISc, Bangalore.
We supported the organization of the ICADL 2001 (International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries) in India in 2001 as part of the event organizing team. As part of the Silver Jubilee celebration of Informatics, we organized Infovision 2005, the first academia-industry conclave. We were instrumental in driving the start of the first iSchool in India, the International School of Information Management (ISIM), by University of Mysore as a collaborative effort between academia and the industry. The seed for the ISIM was sown at the InfoVision 2005, where all the stakeholders of ISIM met to formally announce the setting up of ISIM. We launched the Library Technology Conclave (LTC) as an annual event held since 2016 in partnership with a leading library in the country each year.
Under the Smart City Projects of the Government of India, we have set up several Smart City Digital Libraries in several cities in the country. The Smart City project in Tumkur in Karnataka has won two major awards. The Knowledge Management Portal we set up for a network of research institutions under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India has won two distinct national awards.
• How do you ensure your products remain relevant and valuable in times of rapidly changing educational technologies and information needs?
Innovation is the key to continuity and success, which we have been practising all through. We are continuously watching and spotting emerging technologies, learning about them and adapting them in our product development and service initiatives. We used to bring out a Newsletter called U&I and I used to spot and write about the emerging technology products for the library market.
A quick shift from online (pre-Internet) to CD-ROM databases to the Internet and the cloud illustrates our sustainable growth with fast-changing technologies. We began with trading information products like databases and library technology tools. We graduated to provide content development services to global database producers. With the experience gained, we started building our own products.
Like online, we were the earliest to identify and market CD-ROM databases. Soon, we set up a CD-ROM publishing infrastructure in our company during the early 1990s. We then developed a few local databases, like EXIM India on CD, a quarterly updated full-text database for all import-export related laws, tariffs and regulatory information. We produced the first full-text archival databases on CD-ROM for three Indian medical journals for the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) during the early 1990s.
Our database product, India Business Insight (IBI), is a classic example of our sustained efforts to stay relevant. We started providing abstracting and indexing services to a global business database company for a few leading Indian newspapers and magazines as part of our export services. As we retained the copyright for the content we created, we expanded the source base to several more information sources on Indian business. We launched IBI as a comprehensive database product on Indian business and industry. IBI was first launched on CD-ROM in the late 1990s and subsequently shifted to online in early 2000.
When print journals started moving to the Internet, we looked at it as a new opportunity to build the single largest e-journal database in the world for journal literature, which led to our J-Gate, which has to-date indexed close to 100 million articles in English, adding more than 4 million articles every year now. We made this product a resource-sharing network when the library consortia movement started in India (JCCC–J-Gate Custom Content for Consortia). To keep it technologically relevant, we came out last year with J-Gate version 3, which indexes pre-prints and datasets linking to the article. We started adding cited and citing references for every article, with Scimago ranking data for the journals. The innovation in J-Gate continues now, and there are plans to embrace AI.
When the concept of federated search emerged, we were the first to launch FedGate, a federated search product in India. We were again the first to spot and launch a remote access product (EzProxy) in India in 2010. We now have our remote access product, RemotLog, launched in 2020.
With open-source software products impacting the libraries, we launched Koha in India and started providing support for DSpace and e-Prints. We can take credit for building the largest institutional repository (IR) for the Indian Academy of Science (over one lakh papers of the Academy Fellows), which we have updated and maintained on EPrints.
Moving to the journal publishing domain, we were the earliest to launch the Open Journals System (OJS) to provide publishing support to Indian Journal publishers. This has led to our co-publishing venture under the brand Informaticsjournals.com for a few reputed Indian publishers. We created the digital archive of Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science’s 60-year-old journal on library Science. Endowment has renamed this journal as the Journal of Information and Knowledge.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the table of every sector now. So, what kind of global trends and developments in the information products industry do you observe?
The AI today can write a book on “Books and Libraries”! Its robotic version can shelve books in libraries!! It is going to completely redefine the future of the library landscape, particularly literature search and review, which is already happening. GenAI will drive the future of all conventional databases and discovery services. There are several challenges ahead. Let me mention a few key challenges here.
Gen AI is still a work in progress. It is designed to automatically create derivative content based on the existing content in multiple formats, such as text (summaries, stories, and poems) and images (paintings). This creative character causes hallucinations, leading to wrong and imaginative answers when it comes to answering questions of academic and research interest for reference and evidence-based learning. I am sure there are ways to address this.
AI will reshape and expand the functions of library-centric databases from literature search to literature review and analysis. On the flip side, large-scale aggregation of full-text content, an imperative need for AI implementation, is likely to face copyright war by publishers. ChatGPT and Microsoft are already facing copyright infringement cases from publishers. However, the AI-based models are transformative in nature. They are far more transformative than Google Books, which is legally certified as copyright compliant due to its transformative nature of search and public use without regard to its commercial value to Google. In this sense, AI can be a transformative threat to publishers, driving them to reinvent the very nature and process of publishing. Even the peer-review process is likely to undergo major changes with AI influence, reshaping the publishing practices and perhaps leading to new publishing models.
We have implemented AI in a small way in our J-Gate platform for further review and analysis of the downloaded full-text articles. We are exploring the best ways to implement AI in our J-Gate and other products within the permissible limits of copyright compliance. With AI, I foresee unprecedented and inevitable changes in the way we prepare our team and infrastructure.
• What would be the future of global trends and developments in the ‘information products industry’ and how is informatics strategizing to stay relevant in the industry?
Going by the current trends, the future of library-centric information products for the higher education and research market is being driven significantly by open-access content and, to a limited extent, open-source software. Hence, we are at a crossroad as much as the libraries are! The research-centric content –– journals, pre-prints, and post-prints (Author Accepted Manuscripts); theses and dissertations; patents; data sets; and the like will continue to see mass-scale aggregation for open access. This may open up opportunities for creating AI-driven new tools for deeper analysis of content for specific domains. More importantly, we believe that integrating the access and usage of external content with the internal research management workflow in organizations will open new product development opportunities for us. Classroom-centric educational content, such as textbooks and reference books, will integrate with e-learning platforms driven by AI.
Our strategy for the future is to position ourselves as a company with technology prowess for addressing all streams of educational and research content from creation to organization, aggregation and delivery in different domains and for different markets, expanding beyond the higher education space.
• You have business transactions and relations with different types of libraries. We specifically wish to know where Indian schools and public libraries stand in terms of the use of information products for automation and dissemination of library and information services.
Currently, we are not in the school library market. We got into the public library market in recent years through several smart city projects that had plans to bring in technology to convert the city’s traditional public library system into digital media for wider access to the community. These are large-scale projects with significant investment in technology to build digital collections and automate these libraries. Our public library system is still far behind our academic libraries in all respects, particularly in terms of technology adaptation. I feel that the LIS community should strongly lobby for the Government’s focused investment in a nationwide transformational public library model. The Public Library Acts too need critical review and changes in the process of re-inventing the public library system.
• If you see the libraries of Indian higher education institutions through the lens of business, what are the potentialities and drawbacks?
With about 54,000 institutions in this sector, the business potential is significant. However, the budget for the library spending is skewed in favour of just around 500 academic and research institutions with a spending potential of more than Rs. 1 crore per year. 50-70% of their budget goes to subscriptions to international journals. Colleges largely offering undergraduate programs constitute 90% of the institutions with an average enrolment of less than 700 students. Their library spending is largely on textbooks. The library consortia subscriptions expanded access to several more journals but from very few publishers. However, the beneficiary institutions and their managements considered it as a good-enough-, drying up the market for new journals and many speciality publishers. The influential consortia culture re-defined the market to an exclusive club of about 40 dominant publishers for journals and databases. For instance, Web of Science indexes journals from more than 3,500 rated publishers!
Open access has opened a new chapter in the library’s collection development practices. With journals going OA and with whatever is left being taken care of by One Nation One Subscription (ONOS), libraries will have more money to spend on technologies to improve the quality of access and support services if the managements allow the libraries to transfer the journal budget to new tools technology products..
Cloud computing has removed the need for expensive local IT infrastructure. Libraries are embracing cloud computing as a more reliable option for 24/7 access to their library management systems and e-resources through remote access software. With AI emerging as an answering machine for any question, reference service will be off the library’s service list. Information literacy will be a non-issue with emerging AI-based access and usage interfaces. On a positive note, increasing technology adaptation in higher education libraries is certainly an expanding trend.
Higher education is dominated by global content, and hence, global publishers are driving this market. While the country is estimated to spend over Rs. 1,500 crores on international journals, the market for Indian journals is not even Rs. 100 crores! However, the Indian textbook market is quite vibrant and growing. While the information and knowledge keep growing exponentially, library market as a business prospect does not seem to be so!
From a business perspective, the data on India’s library market is hard to obtain as there are simply no sources. Business has to go by individual companies’ experiences. The library associations in India, like ILA or IASLIC, should have played a role in collecting the data from libraries, like the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in the U.S.A. does.
• What is your impression about the ONOS scheme?
ONOS is a commendable initiative in terms of its subscription-based journal collection and its planned out-reach to a very large number of government funded institutions in the higher education and research segment of the country. Based on our J-Gate data which indexes papers from all ONOS journals, ONOS collection represents more than 75% of papers in 2024 in published in the subscription-based journals. This data amply justifies the ONOS initiative. About 44% of all published papers in 2024 comes from ONOS Journal Collection and 22% of these papers are in open access (OA).
However, ONOS may be late in the day, and may be short-lived, considering the accelerating market share of OA papers. By paper-count, OA has already overtaken subscription-based content. Going by J-Gate data, 57% of all papers published in 2024 is OA. Driven by Plan S, Europe is leading this trend with about 70% of its published papers in OA in 2024. While U.S.A. has been rather slow in immediate OA growth, a directive by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued in August 2022 expects taxpayer-supported research to become immediately available as OA before the end of 2025.
The Indian Government plans to expand the reach of ONOS to private institutions in Phase-2, which is expected to be after 3 years. By then, the global growth rate of OA papers is likely to have crossed 80%. However, a large part of papers published by Indian researchers in international journals are in subscription-based journals. I wish ONOS model was developed based on transformational model approach to secure affordable transition from ONOS to open access.
• Do publishing firms and information/knowledge-based business firms which deal prominently with libraries and information centres really require LIS professionals? What is the realistic picture? As an insider, what extent of scope do you see there for LIS professionals in comparison with the other professionals?
Yes, they do, to a good extent, if not to a large extent. Publishing and information companies certainly offer potential opportunities for LIS professionals as they are trained in content organization, aggregation and management tools and techniques. Your question brings into focus two segments of the information industry: publishing and database production that are largely in the academic and research domain. Database production companies can offer a larger scope of opportunities to the LIS professionals as their needs fit in well with the skill sets of LIS profession.
• So, what are the opportunities for LIS professionals in publishing companies?
First, let us talk about opportunities in publishing companies. Editorial and content production are core areas of publishing. The LIS School curriculum hardly covers this area. However, digital publishing has created two additional major functions for publishers: (1) making the content searchable by all its buyers, which requires building a database of their published content, and (2) creating a technology infrastructure for searching and access. For the latter function, most publishing companies use a third-party technology company for hosting and searching. Building the database is generally done internally, which involves metadata creation with an appropriate level of document classification and indexing specific to the nature of the content published. The task also involves continuous cumulation and aggregation of all the new content published. This is an area that fits the LIS professional’s competency well. Most publishers do it in their own way and rarely follow any standards. Most of them do not even know that librarians can do this job well.
Database production companies are a major segment that is just the right fit for the LIS profession as what they learn in their LIS program largely matches the requirements of this segment. Here again, companies have followed their own proprietary models with very little standardisation. Data format standards like MARC 21 or Dublin Core and inter-operability protocols like OAI/PMH are rarely heard and practised in these companies. Some companies do employ librarians. The scale and speed of operation are very large and fast, as you would notice from the size of databases like Chemical Abstract, Web of Science, MEDLINE, etc. Our own database, J-Gate, handles about 5 million documents a year. A large part of production, including content harvesting, classification and indexing, is automated. Data quality and QC are critical tasks. While the LIS professionals may be technically qualified, the nature of the practice, including workflow, will be significantly different in terms of size and scale of operation compared to their tasks in libraries.
• By one estimate, out of over 146,000 LIS professionals working in the U.S.A. (2023), less than 5% work in the publishing and information industry. I wouldn’t venture any estimation of this for India. One reason could largely be the eco-system gap. LIS professionals appear to be more comfortable working in the academic and non-profit segments. The publishing and information industry knows very little about the skill sets of LIS professionals. This is despite libraries constituting a major market for publishers and academic databases. Two sets of efforts are required to bridge this gap. One, LIS schools will have to enrich their syllabus and teaching practices by including editorial and publishing skills, enabling technology tools and knowledge of industry-scale operations. Secondly, national and international library associations need to bridge the knowledge and understanding gaps between the LIS profession and the industry. It will be a serious marketing challenge for the LIS profession and LIS associations, but worth the effort.
• What is your impression about the LIS curriculum in the context of internship, projects, industry-ready avenues and, more specifically, entrepreneurship? What changes or reforms do you think are necessary?
This is a serious gap area. LIS academia and industry connections in India hardly exist. Our LIS schools are largely disconnected from the information and publishing industry. Every year, we get hundreds of requests from the engineering colleges in the country for internships. In 45 years of my information-industry career in India, I can count very few LIS Schools who approached us for internship projects.
I have seen a few product-specific projects, but the students doing the project rarely work with those respective companies producing the products. I feel happy to see around 50 papers published on our J-Gate and JCCC (consortium version of J-Gate). We got to know about these product-centric projects only after the papers were published. Rarely did anyone contact us before initiating the project. Interestingly, some of them carried very old information about the product. Companies keep upgrading product features and functionalities continuously.
Even library associations like ILA and IASLIC have rarely organized LIS Academia – Industry forums. The LIS profession should be modelling itself more like the IT profession as the Information management function is increasingly becoming IT-centric. This does not seem to be happening. LIS schools need to turn their attention seriously in this direction.
• You deal with many young, middle and senior-level librarians of different libraries on a day-to-day basis for your business. In hindsight, do you sense that some of the LIS professionals are well-fit in the entrepreneurs’ space or business world? If so, what qualities do you think are essential attributes for library professionals to become successful entrepreneurs?
Some of the current generation LIS professionals fitting into entrepreneurial/business space would be more by exception. Those exceptional people know where they are going and what they are going to do to get there. They will succeed if they have risk-taking abilities and can withstand the rough weather of business. I would ask the LIS profession: will a LIS student coming out of an LIS school in India be prepared for and mentally ready to venture into a start-up game with an information business idea he or she feels interested in or passionate about? For this to happen, LIS schools must re-model themselves on a model similar to the management or technical education schools.
The LIS profession in India is too academic in its culture and practice. This is how the LIS schools in India expect them to be and have prepared them through the school’s curricular program. This mindset inherently limits the entrepreneurial culture in the LIS profession. As mentioned earlier, LIS Schools should start with active industry-connect initiatives if they are keen on expanding and targeting their students’ employment potential in the information industry. I hear about very little connection between the LIS department and the library in most universities. Here is where the gap is. LIS is more of a practising profession. Bridging the gap needs to begin from the LIS Schools. LIS schools should also look at project opportunities for their students in other schools within their own campus also to work on domain-specific projects related to information management.
• What is your advice to the budding library professionals wishing to enter the business sector?
My answer to this question is more an extension of my answer to your previous question on LIS professionals getting into entrepreneurial shoes.
In “LIS”, the letter L represents the legacy and the cultural value of libraries, which is largely identified by the physical space for learning, reference and research. “I” represents information and the content. Information is like water, which needs a medium to capture and manage its flow and usage in its changing shape and form. Digital is its form, format and media today. Water evaporates to join the cloud. It returns to the earth as rainwater! In a metaphoric way, content is now born digital; its hosting and management are switched extensively from libraries and publishing points to the cloud to spray out as drops of knowledge that users need, ask for and pick up from wherever they are. While libraries may continue to serve as physical places for study and learning, the entire content delivery and management systems and processes for education, learning and research are managed by the industry with the advantage of scale and technology. The advancing Generative AI scenario will bring in many more such changes, reducing the job opportunities in traditional roles like reference service, information literacy, etc. Educational and research institutions housing large library infrastructure today are creators and users of knowledge that needs to be managed for internal use or publishing, using a wide range of technology tools.
It is time for the LIS profession to consciously redefine and expand its role in two domains. First, it will take leadership in managing information across institutions as an institutional knowledge manager. Second, should align with the information industry as a potential alternative position for practice and career future as a knowledge management professional. At the academic level, LIS schools, too, are significantly transforming as i-Schools with L-tags almost disappearing. It is imperative that LIS schools in India follow a suitable i-School model engineered to its educational eco-system to create a new breed of LIS professionals who can confidently align with dual role options– first, wider institutional knowledge management role through their current position in academia and research; and second, potential opportunities in the information industry as knowledge management professionals.
Several academic libraries in the new universities and research institutions are already showcasing a new board as Knowledge Centre, giving them a new identity in their traditional LIS placements which is a welcome development. To successfully align with the needs of the information industry, the LIS profession needs to shed its mind-set about information products and services as a library-centric function only.
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Note · All the answers/ opinions expressed in this interview/document are of the interviewee.
Cite · Sathyanarayanah, N V (2025). GenAI will drive the future of all conventional databases and discovery services. An interview by Gopakumar V. Open Interview. Accessed on: https://openinterview.org/2025/03/05/n-v-sathyanarayana-genai-will-drive-the-future-of-all-conventional-databases-and-discovery-services/
Credits · Assistance Santosh C Hulagabali; Introductory text: https://fox.cs.vt.edu/I Image of interviewee: https://en.everybodywiki.com/N_V_Sathyanarayana
Gopakumar V, PhD heads the Knowledge Centre and Library at Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation and Technology (Digital University Kerala). He was head of the University Library of Goa University. He has served in different academic institutions and has rich experience of academic librarianship. He was instrumental in initiating UG and PG courses in library and information science at Goa University. He has been serving the library community as a trainer, speaker, author, research supervisor and organiser. He has a great interest in photography. Email: gopakumar.v@duk.ac.in
Insightful
This is a really exhaustive and equally fascinating interview. It took some time for me to read this. I kept returning to read some significant parts. I have been a practising librarian since 1995 and ventured into teaching also later in 2007. This interview is a must-read for all librarians, teachers in LIS and especially young students looking to build their careers. I recommended this interview to my MLIS, PG Diploma students to read. I also wish to follow up on this with a discussion in class, as it will be beneficial in clearing some doubts in their minds.
Mr Satyanarayan is a respected librarian who went on to become a rare and celebrated entrepreneur in the LIS domain. I have benefitted from his professional service in several areas of library operations. After several years, we continue with him to manage our library automation system Koha, off-campus access through RemotLog, DOI services, J Gate, etc.
Mr.Satyanarayan was ahead and could think out of the box to establish Informatics India Ltd in the 1980s. He built an agile company which took on every technology disruption and used it to strengthen its position in the industry. Decades before the “Make In India” call, it was such a proud moment then and also now to have an Indian company venturing into the information industry so successfully.
His input on career opportunities for young LIS students in the information industry is encouraging. His comments on curriculum and the role of LIS schools are eye-openers. I hope LIS schools take his call to improve academia and industry connections seriously and increase collaboration.
Finally, I must appreciate Prof. Gopakumar’s insightful questions, which have brought out Mr Satyanarayana’s personality in front of the LIS community in a very inspiring way. Keep up the excellent work, Dr Santosh Hulagbali. I look forward to more insightful interviews here.
This interview provides great insights into his journey from a librarian to a leader in digital information services.